All three DVDs are great, but I’m going to write about my favorite one.

Advanced Digital matte Painting
195 minutes of lecture that takes you through an entire matte painting process by a great artist.

First of all I have to say that what makes Dylan Cole’s lecture different from others is; you really trust him, he has been always actively and openly sharing his talent with others in various online forums or groups.
Knowing him through his posts in this forum besides seeing his web site will give you enough reason to listen to what he has to say.

In this DVD (Advanced Digital matte Painting) you get to see exactly how he uses different tools in Adobe Photoshop® to create type of work he has amazed us with.

He will start with coloring a basic sketch and preparing the composition as a foundation for his matte painting.

He then explains how to Paint the Sky and Cloud while showing you the simplicity of it along with different methods to combining digital photographed cloud with painting.

Then you will see how to create those beautiful Green hills and mountains and how to blend them together and add atmospheric perspective to them. And in all the steps he repeats importance of light and shadow and explains how to use them to make the digital photograph to work for you.

He then explains how to use Photo Manipulation to create new photo realistic elements, for architectural detailing. And he shows how to add Realistic Lighting to the painting.

Then you will learn how to add hand paintings right beside digital photograph to shape the forms and add details.

At the end you get to see how to use cloud shadows and small details to deal with different challenges and bring all the elements in the harmony.

And it’s all done in a Non-Destructive way so you can go back and modify each element.

This DVD covers what a Matte Painter is dealing with in almost any type of project.
Imagine you spend a year reading through a few Photoshop books and practice mattepainting for a year and then try to collect all of your best related notes in one place, You will end up with something very similar to the content of this DVD.
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On the other hand; Although these DVDs cover many of the daily challenges in matte painting but There are still a lot to learn from him, and it’s not covered enough in these DVDs, such as preparing the matte painting for parallax effects in compositing, or preparing them for 3D projection which are getting more popular.
P.S. If you get a better deal by buying all three of his DVDs, get them all.
Because if you buy one of these DVDs, most likely you will order the other two as well. [/*:m:2fqo342w]